safaribooks

SafariBooks

Download and generate EPUB of your favorite books from Safari Books Online library.
I'm not responsible for the use of this program, this is only for personal and educational purpose.
Before any usage please read the O'Reilly's Terms of Service.

✨✨ Attention needed ✨✨

• This project is no longer actively maintained.
• Login through safaribooks no longer works due to changes in ORLY APIs.
• The program needs a major refactor to include new features and integrate new APIs.
• However... it still work for downloading books.
  (Use SSO hack: log in via browser, then copy cookies into cookies.json, see below and issues. Love ❤️)

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Overview:

• Requirements & Setup
• Usage
• Single Sign-On (SSO), Company, University Login
• Calibre EPUB conversion
• Example: Download Test-Driven Development with Python, 2nd Edition
• Example: Use or not the --kindle option

Requirements & Setup:

First of all, it requires python3 and pip3 or pipenv to be installed.

$ git clone https://github.com/lorenzodifuccia/safaribooks.git
Cloning into 'safaribooks'...

$ cd safaribooks/
$ pip3 install -r requirements.txt

OR

$ pipenv install && pipenv shell

The program depends of only two Python 3 modules:

lxml>=4.1.1
requests>=2.20.0

Usage:

It's really simple to use, just choose a book from the library and replace in the following command:

• X-es with its ID,
• email:password with your own.

$ python3 safaribooks.py --cred "[email protected]:password01" XXXXXXXXXXXXX

The ID is the digits that you find in the URL of the book description page:
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/book-name/XXXXXXXXXXXXX/
Like: https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/test-driven-development-with/9781491958698/

Program options:

…

The first time you use the program, you'll have to specify your Safari Books Online account credentials (look here for special character).
The next times you'll download a book, before session expires, you can omit the credential, because the program save your session cookies in a file called cookies.json.
For SSO, please use the sso_cookies.py program in order to create the cookies.json file from the SSO cookies retrieved by your browser session (please follow these steps).

Pay attention if you use a shared PC, because everyone that has access to your files can steal your session. If you don't want to cache the cookies, just use the --no-cookies option and provide all time your credential through the --cred option or the more safe --login one: this will prompt you for credential during the script execution.

You can configure proxies by setting on your system the environment variable HTTPS_PROXY or using the USE_PROXY directive into the script.

Calibre EPUB conversion

Important: since the script only download HTML pages and create a raw EPUB, many of the CSS and XML/HTML directives are wrong for an E-Reader. To ensure best quality of the output, I suggest you to always convert the EPUB obtained by the script to standard-EPUB with Calibre. You can also use the command-line version of Calibre with ebook-convert, e.g.:

$ ebook-convert "XXXX/safaribooks/Books/Test-Driven Development with Python 2nd Edition (9781491958698)/9781491958698.epub" "XXXX/safaribooks/Books/Test-Driven Development with Python 2nd Edition (9781491958698)/9781491958698_CLEAR.epub"

After the execution, you can read the 9781491958698_CLEAR.epub in every E-Reader and delete all other files.

The program offers also an option to ensure best compatibilities for who wants to export the EPUB to E-Readers like Amazon Kindle: --kindle, it blocks overflow on table and pre elements (see example).
In this case, I suggest you to convert the EPUB to AZW3 with Calibre or to MOBI, remember in this case to select Ignore margins in the conversion options:

Examples:

• Download Test-Driven Development with Python, 2nd Edition:

…

 The result will be (opening the `EPUB` file with Calibre):  

• Use or not the --kindle option:

  $ python3 safaribooks.py --kindle 9781491958698
  

  On the right, the book created with --kindle option, on the left without (default):

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Thanks!!

For any kind of problem, please don't hesitate to open an issue here on GitHub.

Lorenzo Di Fuccia